Bryan Appleyard pays homage to a sign in Wells-next-the-sea which includes a fine example of ‘found poetry’. Wikipedia gives another example from William Whewell’s "Elementary Treatise on Mechanics":
And hence no force, however great,
can stretch a cord, however fine,
into a horizontal line
that shall be absolutely straight.
Apparently the miserable sod changed the wording when this was pointed out to him.
The absolute apotheosis of the found poetry phenomenon is BBC Radio 4’s strangely haunting Shipping Forecast, (all too familiar to cricket lovers, as it interrupts Test Match Special). Read in a clear, calm, rhythmic voice, a typical poem might be:
Humber, Thames. Southeast veering southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Thundery showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.
Tyne, Dogger. Northeast 3 or 4. Occasional rain. Moderate or poor.
Rockall, Malin, Hebrides. Southwest gale 8 to storm 10, veering west, severe gale 9 to violent storm 11. Rain, then squally showers. Poor, becoming moderate.
The most productive source of found poetry these days is email spam. Here's one made from a couple of days’ worth of subject lines, which I think summarises the Think of England philosophy nicely:
Non-english nut-gathering
Peach blister. New Hampshire
went into remission.
Lamb preparatory,
ore smelter mis-mark.
Thanks! Placemats Turkey
Soggy support group
And wall.
Humber, Thames. Southeast veering southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later.
ReplyDelete...
Southwest gale 8 to storm 10, veering west, severe gale 9 to violent storm 11. Rain, then squally showers. Poor, becoming moderate.
How very odd.
I think I have heard those exact words in a Thomas Dolby song, "Wind Power" from "The Golden Age of Wireless"
You think right. Or at least a similar combination of words - see that Wikipedia link for more such uses in music etc.
ReplyDeleteTold you it was haunting.
This could be the next new movement in English poetry> I shall try to 'find' more.
ReplyDeleteThe challenge is to get it to rhyme. No haikus - they're a proper cop-out.
ReplyDeleteNo, too easy - to make it into a Spenserian sonnet: 14 lines, iambic pentameter, a-b a-b, b-c b-c, c-d c-d, e-e rhyme scheme.
If anyone can pull that off they can take over from Motion as Poet Laureate right now (he's useless anyway).
We Yanks have already got a Found Poet Laureate:
ReplyDeleteThe Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Hart Seely, "The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld", Slate Magazine, Wednesday April 2 2003.
Rumsfeld's Great Pronouncement did us such a tremendous service in clarifying hitherto vague epistemic categories, that people forget how poetic it was.
ReplyDeleteSome group in the US labelled that passage of Rumsfeld's as the year's most egregiously awful use of language.
ReplyDeleteTheir appellation was more self-diagnosing than they knew.